Advertisement

Special report:The battle for primary school places

An ITV London investigation has revealed the full scale of the crisis looming over the capital's primary schools.

Government figures have already revealed that London will need to find tens of thousands of extra school places by 2015, due to a lack of investment and booming birth rates.

But our research has revealed what that means for this year's intake of pupils - with schools facing a shortage of nearly 2,000 places in just 12 London Boroughs.

We contacted all 32 of London's local authorities, asking them how many primary school applications they had received this year and how many places they had available. 16 local authorities replied and 12 provided us with figures.

The data will be skewed slightly by the fact that you can apply for primary places in more than one borough, but in total, there are 1876 more applications than places across those 12 boroughs.

If we assume that these are representative, that would mean a shortfall of 5003 across the whole of London.

And that figure doesn't necessarily convey the full scale of the problem as some of those places are in temporary classrooms - some boroughs include them in the shortfall, others don't.

The numbers are far from consistent across London. In Kensington and Chelsea there's a shortfall of 382 places, in Harrow they need an extra 474 places and in Barnet, they've received 806 more applications than they have places available.

Ezgi Kivilcim and her daughter Almeira are hoping for their first choice school

But some councils - like Islington - actually have spare capacity with 41 extra places. Whether an area has a shortfall or a surplus depends on a number of factors, many of which are beyond the control of the local authorities themselves.

This week London Tonight will be showing a series of special reports, looking at the issue in detail.

We'd like to hear from you if you or your family are likely to be affected by it.